There Will Be Phlogiston (17 page)

“It would be somewhat hypocritical for I seek it
myself.” She lifted her chin, and pushed back her shoulders,
assuming what she hoped was a lips-accessible position. “Jones, you
may kiss me as well, if you wish.”

“I do wish.” His rose onto his knees, still
straddling Arkady, and pulled her to him. His palm curved tenderly
around the back of her neck, finding all those magical, tingly
places that lurked beneath her hair, and then he kissed her,
opening to her. His mouth was hot and harsh like the brandy—maybe
she had misjudged the drink—and it could just have been her fancy
but she thought she tasted Arkady. She wondered, albeit only
briefly, if it should have troubled her. But it didn’t. It didn’t
make Jones any less hers, or his kisses any less delightful. She
clutched his shoulders, venturing deeper, the glide of his tongue
against hers reminding her suddenly—and shockingly vividly—of his
fingers moving intimately upon her. Squeaking, she pulled away,
scalded with desire and blushing.

“Are you all right?” asked Jones, a faint frown
creasing his brow.

Arkady pushed himself onto his elbows. “I can leave
you. I have no wish to trespass.”

She almost said yes, just so she wouldn’t have to
worry about what he might think of her. But then got a little bit
cross. Had she not spent enough of her life preoccupied with the
perceptions and expectations of other people? What was the point of
running away with an ineligible commoner and his male lover if one
was still stuck giving a damn? And besides, Arkady was a sodomite,
what right did he have to judge her a wanton? She opened her mouth
to say as much, but the words failed to emerge, and she realised
what was holding them back was the fact she
liked
Arkady too
much to protect herself by hurting him.

And that was . . . unexpected. Hurting other people
first was the most effective method she had found for stopping them
hurting her. But how could she repay Arkady for his trust and his
honesty, by denying him hers?

He was already wriggling out from under Jones, so
she put a hand on his arm. “Stay. I was simply afraid I would shock
you in return.”

His lips turned upwards. “Wouldn’t that be
hypocritical?”

“Well, yes. But such considerations rarely carry the
weight they ought.” She sighed. “The truth is, I rather enjoyed
watching you kiss Jones. It was very . . . aesthetic. Is that
peculiar?”

“I find it preferable to the alternative.”

“As do I, but I’m . . .” she hesitated, hating to
say it “. . . scared.”

“Of me?”

“Of me . . . and of the things I want. I fear the
loss of some fundamental part of me that I lack the experience to
understand.”

Jones left Arkady—dismounted, she thought, with a
slightly hysterical, internal giggle—and came to her, wrapping her
up in his arms. “There’s nothing wrong in what you want, but
there’s no wrong in waiting until it feels right either.”

“I’ve spent my whole life fearing what I want,”
Arkady told her. “I feared I would lose myself the first time I put
my mouth on a man. The first time I took a man inside my body. I
feared I would lose myself if I kissed a man, or if I loved one.”
His eyes flicked briefly to Jones. “But I’m more myself than I have
ever been.”

She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding brittle
and unpleasant. “What lives we lead, spending them in fear of
love.”

“No—” Arkady’s smile was bright and fierce “—I am
done with that. I won’t be ashamed or afraid anymore.”

She touched her fingers to his shorn hair, letting
what remained of the red-gold strands slip between her fingers. “I
don’t want to be either.” She was silent a moment, lost and
thoughtful, confused and wanting. And then she knew exactly what to
do. “Show me,” she said. And then, remembering she was trying to be
a better a person. “I mean, would you show me? If you please.”

Arkady spluttered. “And to think I was concerned I
would shock you with a kiss.”

“I think I should like to see you together if it
would not discomfort you. I would like to see these acts you speak
of, that are performed in love and bring no shame nor loss of
self.”

“What?” Jones was laughing against her neck. “All of
them?”

“Yes,” she said proudly. “All of them.”

“Well, perhaps some of them?” To her surprise,
Arkady was grinning too.

She blinked at them, mildly irritated by their
sudden reserve. “I promise I won’t be shocked.”

Jones kissed her under her jaw, making her pulse
leap beneath his lips. “Love, there are limitations on what a man
can do.”

“With another man?”

“No. Limitations on his pleasure.” Her expression
must have reflected her incomprehension because he went on,
awkwardly. “A man can only come once, and then he has to wait a
while before he can, uh . . .”

“Seek satisfaction again,” finished Arkady
helpfully.

Rosamond gazed at them, stricken. “Oh, you poor
things. How awfully disappointing for you.”

“We contrive to make do.” Arkady settled back
against the pillows, and ran a sly finger along Jones’s thigh.
“Now, why don’t you come and make love to me, as the lady
suggests?”

“A gentleman never says no to a lady.” Jones leaned
down and kissed him again, and this time Rosamond was close enough
to catch the details—the cling of skin to skin, the helpless look
on Jones’s face, the gilded flicker of Arkady’s eyelashes, the way
a kiss was not really one thing at all, but a succession of
moments, tender and passionate and intimate, flowing into each
other.

She noted rather ruefully that she could probably
learn something from this. Her own habit was to dive right in, as
she was also wont to do with sweets when nobody was looking. She
had once in a single sitting eaten an entire box of the
rose-flavoured lokum her father sometimes brought back from his
trips. But watching Jones and Arkady she realised giddily she was
never going to run out of kisses.

“You know,” she said, since they seemed so amenable
to counsel, “you might find it more comfortable to be naked as you
proceed.” And, then, because being a more honest person was
probably necessary to being a better one, she added, “I enjoy the
sight of unclad men.”

Jones grinned at her and stripped off the remains of
his evening wear with gratifying alacrity. She was pleased to
discover he looked as marvellous as she remembered, especially with
the gaslight flickering like adoring tongues over the hard bands of
his muscles and the deep hollows between them.

Arkady met her eyes somewhere in the region of
Jones’s abdomen (for he was especially rough-hewn and rippling
there) and murmured, “As do I.”

“And I.” Jones leaned over Arkady to relieve him of
his shoes and stockings, and began slowly to ease his trousers
down.

For all the thrill of Jones’s willingness to shed
his clothing at a moment’s notice, there was something quite
tantalising about this gradual revelation, dark fabric giving way
to pale skin, all of Arkady’s beauty laid bare before them.

“Oh, you’re exquisite,” said Rosamond. “You make me
wish I could paint something other than pissant little watercolours
of meadows.” She traced the sharp lines of his collarbones, erratic
colour rising beneath her fingers, like the pattern of lights at
the heart of opal.

“Aye.” Jones crawled on the bed with them.
“Beautiful.”

Arkady’s knees came up to embrace him, and Rosamond
thought it must have been instinct alone, for he also flung an arm
across his eyes, the flush spreading down his chest, and curling up
his throat. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Tough.” Jones spanned his hands possessively over
Arkady’s hipbones, half-pinning, half-caressing, holding him there
between his palms. He glanced at Rosamond, smiling a little, his
eyes bright with some still-uncertain joy. “He hardly let me look
at him, before.”

Arkady made a soft noise and writhed, eyes squeezing
tightly shut in the shadow of his forearm. “I love the way you look
at me. I love the way you touch me. Please touch me.”

His male parts clearly concurred. It was
hard—
difficult
, that is—not to heed the urgent, slightly
pleading way his member curved towards his stomach. Had Rosamond
been Jones at that moment, she would have curled her hand around
it, to know the weight and texture of all that taut, rose-and-ivory
skin, and it was almost as if Jones read her thought because he did
exactly that, a few droplets of pearly fluid spilling over his
fingers in greeting. Arkady’s spine arched, his whole body
straining like his desirous manhood.

Having two men present did rather lead one into a
comparative frame of mind, but it did neither of them disservice.
It was fascinating, really, the variation between what ought to
have been two very similar anatomies. Arkady, she thought, was the
more sizeable, but the dense dark hair from which Jones’s still
rather imposing appendage sprang lent it an air of drama. Typical,
really, of the man to possess a vulgar cock.

Nevertheless, it seemed her own anatomies were quite
responsive to such contemplations. She shifted a little on the bed,
oddly conscious of the brush of her nipples against her chemise,
and the heat gathering in her drawers.

“Like this?” The bone ridges on the back of Jones’s
hand flexed and the knotty blue-ish veins writhed as he tightened
his grip, manipulating the other man with quite some vigour, the
sound of slick skin sliding against itself a peculiarly visceral
counterpoint to all their ragged breaths.

Rosamond would have imagined such a touch might be
painful, but Arkady’s wild cry was the very opposite of pain. “Yes.
Oh, fuck, yes.”

The raw obscenity, clad in Arkady’s usually so
genteel voice, both shocked and excited her. It was the worst word,
she knew, and consequently her favourite, and she loved to hear
other people swearing. She had long thought it the epitome of
personal abandonment. But that was before she had spent an evening
in the company of two gloriously deviant gentlemen, who were now
sharing her bed, lost both to each other and to advanced,
glistening priapism. It was filthy and wonderful, and Rosamond
devoured them with greedy eyes.

Abruptly, Arkady seized Jones’s wrist. “God, stop,
or I’ll come.” They both stilled, wide-eyed and panting, sweat
making silver patchwork of their skin. “I don’t want to come
without you inside me.”

Jones grinned, showing a flash of gold from one of
his back teeth. “That’s easily fixed.”

“Not yet.” There was a flurry of movement, so many
limbs, pale skin and darker, and now Jones was underneath, and
Arkady astride him. “I never touched you enough.”

They moved into another kiss, quite different to the
last one, rougher and deeper, to match the harsh sounds they made
against each other’s mouth. Jones’s hands slid all the way up
Arkady’s spine, curving over his shoulder blades to pull him
closer, and Rosamond realised she hadn’t touched Jones enough
either.

She had always rather prided herself on a
well-developed instinct for self-preservation, and she had
recognised what she had done that day in the woods was dangerous—to
her virtue, certainly, but more pressingly her heart. It turned out
that when a man made himself naked, and knew how to kiss properly,
it had rather a way of moving one. And had she learned also how it
felt to command a lover’s pleasure, and make it her own, how then
would she ever have let him go?

But now she didn’t have to. Not ever, unless she
wanted. And there would be plenty of time to explore Anstruther
Jones at her leisure, to make him groan and shudder and come just
for her. But now Arkady needed that freedom more, and she wanted
him to have it and to glory in it, as she fully intended to do.
Besides, it could not hurt to gather a little advance information
about the . . . lie of the land, to speak. The human body was
rather intimidating in scope, and there seemed so many aspects to
it, so many intriguing configurations to stroke, and taste and
claim and perhaps even . . . bite?

Oh yes, biting seemed entirely acceptable. Arkady’s
lips had slipped from Jones’s and were tracing a shining path down
the man’s throat, and sometimes he would pause, openmouthed, over
some tender spot, until Jones groaned, the sound of his pleasure so
deep and rich that she half imagined licking it from his skin.
Arkady was thorough, learning the other man by taste and touch, his
body covering and revealing Jones in enticing flashes like the
shore beneath the sea. Her favourite moments, though, were when
Arkady would discover some place, some way of touching, that would
draw some naked, needy sound from Jones, make him shudder and
writhe, and clench those strong hands helplessly around empty
air.

She would never have guessed men could be so
sensitive, so full of secrets, not when their arousal was so
overtly and specifically made manifest. But she loved to know that
the lightest graze of teeth against his nipples could make Jones
gasp. Or his hips would buck when Arkady ran his thumbs up the
crease of his pelvis. That the interiors of his forearms were paler
than the rest of him. That he was slightly ticklish towards the
tops of his hips. That passion made him beautiful, and there was
nothing of himself he was not willing to give.

Like the tide coming in, the boundaries between who
was touching and who was the touched slowly dissolved until they
were simply locked in each other’s arms, moving together, skin to
skin and breath to breath.

Arkady turned onto his back and reached out to
Jones, drawing their faces close, gazing up at the other man with
such wonderment that Rosamond stared at the shadows of their
pleasingly aligned cocks in order to give them the privacy of their
moment. “Now,” Arkady whispered, after a second or two, “please
now.”